Thank you for a fair and courteous answer. I've seen the comments in another forum and they brought home to me how easy it is to get defensive (or offensive) about this game...or any game you have a strong opinion about...and say things you may not have meant to put so strongly.Not that some people don't mean every bit of what they say and I'll admit I've been guilty of it myself.

I'll grant you that Walker went overboard in some of the words he used and I probably liked the review despite that because it tickled my (often odd) sense of humor. However, if you read his previous thoughts about Moebius in July of last year (here:http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/07/17/hands-on-jane-jensens-moebius/), where he says things like this, you might be tempted to cut him a little slack. "...while the puzzles were absolutely contrived, and the circumstances daft, it was the right sort of contrived and daft, and delivered with a deft hand that reminds why Jensen has such a huge reputation (if you pretend Gabriel Knight 3 didn’t happen)."

And again: "It took me a while to put my finger on what it was that felt different about playing the first couple of chapters of Moebius. ...What about all the traditional point-n-click elements being exactly where you’d expect them to be makes this feel different from its peers?

"It’s good!

"It was this that was eluding me. I love adventure games, and as such, I’ll put up with an awful lot. It’s testament to how bad so many are that I still find myself mostly complaining in most reviews. It was peculiar to be experiencing all the silly tropes of the genre, but realising I wasn’t fighting against it to have a good time. It was just letting me."

Does that sound like someone who wanted this game to be awful and was just waiting to pounce on it?I think you'll agree that it doesn't.It seems to me that he did what some have accused me of in another instance: set his expectations too high.For someone who knows who Jane Jensen is, what she's done in the past and his experience of the early build, I suppose that isn't surprising.

Actually, with the exception of some words that could have been left out of that review, I like a strong opinion like his. I suppose I want a reviewer to "tell me what you really think". If my interest in a game is high, I might play a game despite a spate of negative reviews but from GK3 onward (which I did play through completely and not only found the graphics awful but the ending the most farcical I can remember, never mind the cat mustache puzzle), I've had little interest in Jane Jensen's games.Walker, on the other hand, seems to have expected a heck of a lot and when he, in his view, didn't get it, he expressed a heck of a lot of unhappiness about it.I might have done, too, in his shoes.

Best to you. I'm glad you're enjoying Moebius and, for the sake of future games JJ might make for her fans, I sincerely hope it does well.

Gil.

_________________________
"Best not to think about it. I don't want to fall to bits 'cos of excess existential thought."

Thank you for the link to that juvenile rant of Mr Walker's. He should tell us what he really feels. I find his rant quite unprofessional, not because I have a strong opinion about the game in either direction. It is his smug superior attitude that I found quite humorous. For instance in this quote below he attempts to impress readers with his superior vocabulary. Someone should point out that Misdirector is not a word. When you nit pic out of pure meanness, as he did with the character's name, he should at least use a real word

"But here’s what I can safely tell. You mostly play as the ludicrously named Malachi Rector (I couldn’t tell if the homonym of “Mr Rector”/”Misdirector” was deliberate, but considering everything else in the plot this would seem an optimistic reach), a New York-based British antiques expert with a purported IQ of 170, a photographic memory, and the personality of a spoilt turd."

Now that we mere civilians are duly impressed with Mr. Walker's intellect in his hit job on an accomplished creative writer we feel compelled to point out Walker's obvious failure to pay attention to detail. Please Mister Walker, when criticizing someone's work double check your own. The quote below is very sloppy.

Ah, but you say it was a typo and the error is not yours. Really, that is your defense? Sorry, that's nothing more than a ”Misdirector.” I suggest you use your superior intellect to proof read those servants below you before putting you name on it, for others to read. This is especially important when you write a full scale attack against someone who actually created something.

I've not decided if I will offer a review of my own. It has been awhile since my last. I prefer not to insult your intelligence by suggesting I know more than you, or what you should like. I describe the nuts and bolts believing the reader is intelligent enough to decide if they want to play it or not.

Thank you Mr. Walker for demonstrating how not to write a review and illustrating how easy it is to offend your self important ego. Your review does tell us an awful lot about you.

It's interesting how John Walker's opinion changed so drastically between his hands on preview and his review. In one of his comments further down the review page, he says

Originally Posted By: John Walker

As the review says, it began being mildly interesting and charming. And from that, I had hopes. The premise, as I noted back in the preview, was extremely daft in those first two chapters, but there was something pleasingly competent about it all. And it had so much promise. It felt like the beginning of a big, interesting story.

It really wasn’t.

Everything in that preview that evoked, “Gosh, I’m excited about where this is heading!” ended up going nowhere, or just to awful, stupid places. The daftness just becomes utter gibberish. As I said back then, “What I’ve played is far too little to give an impression on whether the story and concept will hold up.” And sadly, it didn’t. At all.

I finished the game last night. On the whole, I did rather enjoy it. The character animation was fairly awful, and the plot cheerfully preposterous. What did keep me gripped and glued was the burgeoning relationship between Malachi and Walker. It was a constant thrum throughout the game, and an evolving, positive one, I felt. It's good to see LGBTAI relationships addressed in a way such as this, in any gaming genre.

Hi Maggsie,You can download the game from GOG (my favorite) or from Phoenix Online Studios, and a few others. I'm fairly sure that a BOXED version of this game is NOT available. I hope this info helps you, and ENJOY this game when you DO get it.Sandy

Phoenix Online Publishing™ has today released the critically acclaimed paranormal mystery adventure game Moebius: Empire Rising for PC and Mac. Players can enjoy this all-new tale by Jane Jensen, creator of the Gabriel Knight® video game series (and hailed as "the Agatha Christie of adventure games"), for just $29.99 via Phoenix Online's website (http://www.POStudios.com), Steam, GOG and other online stores.

Just finished the game Moebius. It is by far my favorite game this year. Intelligent scenario with lots of analysis, almost no violence compare to games of war and living deads that invades the market this year. I was really desperate to find a game to suit my taste. I love the character of Malachi, intelligent, antisocial and extremely knowlageable and cultivated. Enjoyed the complicity of a "savant and a warrior". The story is most fascinating with the analitic puzzles, a bit like Sherlock Holmes games. I hope there will be a suite to the story.